By Daniel Libit
How much should you spend on a gift for a retiring college athletic director?
For the University of New Mexico Lobo Club, the answer to that question, as it came to pass last August, was $412.
According to a copy of the organization’s expense records, that is the amount the Lobo Club paid to buy former UNM AD Paul Krebs a handcrafted, solid maple ass-pedestal from Standard Chair of Gardner. The purchase was designated, “Miscellaneous”.
Now, mind you, there were some extenuating circumstances surrounding Krebs’s departure.
He was not so much retiring, in the affirmative sense, as he was resigning under intensifying pressure over a 2015 Scottish golf trip he had arranged for himself and some Lobo boosters, which had fallen under the scrutiny of the Offices of the New Mexico State Auditor and Attorney General. That burgeoning scandal — and a contemporaneous one involving the discovery of nearly a half-million dollars of unpaid luxury suite revenue for UNM men’s basketball games — had now fully breached the levees of the Lobo Club.
In due course, the controversies would put an embattled Lobo athletic director and UNM’s bedraggled sports booster group at a tense, face-saving impasse.
Little known to anyone outside the Lobo Club’s Executive Committee is that Krebs had already been spearheading an effort, months in the making, to officially do away with the organization.
At points last summer, before all hell broke loose, this looked to be the direction things were headed: the Lobo Club was going to be officially swallowed up by the UNM Foundation.
But alas, before you can get rid of the Lobo Club, you first have to understand what the Lobo Club is. Continue reading “Unplugging the Lobo Club Matrix”